In certain locations, such as residential, commercial and industrial buildings, etc., it may be desirous to monitor, control and/or collect information (e.g., node information) generated by one or more sensors and/or measuring or control devices distributed throughout the location. Previous inventions have disclosed network nodes operable to wirelessly transmit and receive its respective network node information to and from a centralized location.
However, it is believed that such a system is difficult to implement, considering low power transmission requirements and possibly disadvantageous environmental conditions, if at least one of the network nodes is blocked, for example, by an obstacle, ambient noise, interference, etc., from transmitting or receiving its related node information.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,850,511 and 7,002,944, hereby incorporated by reference herein, teach a timely organized wireless ad hoc network or networks to overcome these shortcomings. But, each network node in the plurality of network nodes is assigned only one time slot during the time-slotted communications interval. Such a network does not provide for the network node to report more information than can fit within an assigned time slot and does not provide advantageous error handling.
Traditional networks are static, i.e., the relationship between various nodes are established when the network is designed and rarely changes thereafter. However, in an ad hoc network, such as Intech 21's wireless ad hoc network, communications paths between nodes are often dynamic. A network administrator may wish to monitor and troubleshoot such networks.
Thus, there is a need to automatically generate diagrams illustrating in a topographical fashion the relationship between various nodes in such timely organized ad hoc networks.